What if she gets better?

[Family Court Strategies: When Your Partner Has BPD OR NPD Traits.]

It might be correct to state that we al, have "issues." I like the way that my T put it, "we all have 'wounds'." After spending many months and thousands of dollars in therapy, it was concluded that that there is nothing pathologically wrong with me, or even anything close. I argued with the T (in part to mess with him), and he got visibly frustrated. I was playing devils advocate, but I was also fishing.

Do you really feel that you have mental health issues? In such relationships,.it can be hard to gain clarity apart from our partner's projections. As my T said, there may be about 15% Truth to what my ex said, but it's mixed up and distorted within her compartmentalized personality.

[Turkish]

It might be correct to state that we al, have "issues." I like the way that my T put it, "we all have 'wounds'." After spending many months and thousands of dollars in therapy, it was concluded that that there is nothing pathologically wrong with me, or even anything close. I argued with the T (in part to mess with him), and he got visibly frustrated. I was playing devils advocate, but I was also fishing.

Do you really feel that you have mental health issues? In such relationships,.it can be hard to gain clarity apart from our partner's projections. As my T said, there may be about 15% Truth to what my ex said, but it's mixed up and distorted within her compartmentalized personality.

[thisagain]

I don't think I have any sort of inherent mental disorder. And the three therapists I've seen during/after our relationship agree that there's nothing, as you say, pathologically wrong with me. I was in T for a year before we met and the two years we were together. I added a second T a few months after we moved in together, to get in more frequent sessions because she insisted there was something wrong that I wasn't addressing. When I moved last month I asked both of them if they thought I should continue therapy, and they both said that I was totally fine but might need more support to cope with the relationship.

There is definitely a small amount of truth to her accusations about how I treated her during the relationship. But most of it was from me being uninformed about her BPD, expecting her to act like a normal person, and not really being sure how to handle it when she didn't. For example, after years of watching her self-sabotage and then use the ensuing stress as an excuse to emotionally abuse me, I went through a phase where I would try to solve all the crises myself, which she read as controlling and judgmental. So I listened to her, read up on here, talked to my T, and realized I need to let her make her own mistakes and use boundaries and other tools to keep her from abusing me during her inevitable crises. I never had that kind of problem before, and I don't think it would happen in a relationship with a healthy person.

I did have some family issues (being afraid to say what I wanted or how I was feeling), which I had been doing really well with before meeting my ex with BPD. But then once she started raging at me for having feelings, or shutting down and giving me the ST whenever I tried to talk to her, that brought back some of my old fear. And then I would sometimes express things in counterproductive or passive-aggressive ways because I knew she wouldn't respond well if I just said it directly. That would set her off to rage some more. But she wasn't able to listen to why it happened or address the reasons I was afraid to talk to her.

Especially during the last couple months of our relationship, she was convinced that she's doing great now and if I'm afraid to talk to her, that's something I need to work out on my own. There were a few somewhat positive experiences where she kind of listened for a while, but it was very tenuous and easy for her to flip back into raging or painting herself black. Definitely not enough for me (or any other sane reasonable person) to feel comfortable talking to her.

So that's mostly why I'm still in T now, to make sure that my (totally reasonable) fear of expressing feelings to her doesn't spill over into other areas of my life. Also to address some post-traumatic symptoms that I got from her, like nightmares and panic attacks. But I believe that I was really quite healthy when the relationship started and there's nothing inherently wrong with me.

In fact I think the only reason I stayed at the beginning was that I was so convinced that all I had to do was speak up for myself and then she would listen and cooperate. I knew I didn't deserve to be treated that way. But I wasn't prepared for the possibility that I could do all the communication right on my end, and the other person wouldn't be able to hear or respond appropriately. So I just kept trying, and she kept raging at me for daring to have feelings or ask something from her. I was so confused about how this could be happening--when I had learned so much and worked so hard to do it right--so I was mostly just too stunned and depressed to really grasp the problem for a long time.